We were lucky to catch up with Massimo Zaretti recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Massimo thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
The idea for Il Massimo came about because I really wanted to revisit the perception of Italian cuisine. The idea was to break away from certain stereotypes and to offer an authentic yet original dining experience. Gone are the checkered tablecloths, Chianti bottles on the tables, classic Italian songs, and spaghetti with meatballs. Italian cuisine is focused on simplicity, or in other words, using few ingredients in each dish. So in order for the dishes to shine, it is crucial that we source the best quality ingredients possible. This is one of the reasons I chose Ensenada, Mexico. Ensenada provides a very Mediterranean climate and has a rich terroir offering an abundance of organic local produce that compliment Italian cuisine extremely well. Heirloom tomatoes, organic basil and arugula, heirloom baby vegetables, berries, fresh seafood, and a wine country growing Italian grape varietals, are just some of the many products you can find locally that help in providing the high quality needed in our restaurant. We combine these with imported Italian products such as Calabrian chilis, ‘00’ flour, San marzano tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil and black truffles to name a few, in order to maintain authenticity. Lastly, it was also important to make as much as we can in house. All of our pastas are made fresh daily, we serve a fresh pesto to accompany with your bread, and all of our desserts are meticulously crafted. On the subject of originality, you might not find too many classic dishes such as carbonara, chicken Marsala, or classic lasagna. Instead we aim to provide top quality ingredients and combine them in an original way, such as our handmade bucatini with black truffle and crispy pancetta, spinach fettuccine with a 7 hour slow braised pork shank ragu, and a pannacotta in the shape of a little piggy.
Another aspect that is fundamental for Il Massimo is service, and more importantly hospitality. My background consists of working in food & beverage for 5 star hotels more than 15 years in places such as Mandalay Bay Las Vegas, Forte Village Sardinia, St Regis Bangkok, Grand Hyatt Singapore, Hilton Tokyo, and Hotel Del Coronado San Diego. Therefore the team and I at Il Massimo continually strive to exceed our guests’ expectations. We believe that we are not in the food industry, we are in the hospitality industry, and creating positive connections with our guests is the ideal way to provide memorable experiences. In addition to attentive yet unobtrusive service, positive work environments, and a warm and friendly attitude, we also enjoy showering out guests with complimentary items such as an amuse bouche at the beginning of the meal and a glass of homemade limoncello or chocolate liqueur at the end.
Our final focus is on value. We prefer to keep our pricing moderate and accessible and always strive to provide the best value for the experience we aim to provide. There’s nothing worse than overpaying for a plate of pasta that was not executed properly and we aim to change that.
A good restaurant is a recipe of 3 ingredients. Good food, good service, and good ambience. The key, however, is that these three ingredients are balanced and go hand in hand. That is truly the best way to offer memorable experiences and will always be our mission with Il Massimo
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Hailing from Rome Italy, my family moved to the United States where my father owned restaurants. I started cleaning tables when I was 13 years old. I had the privilege of living in Las Vegas which helped kick start my career. When I was old enough I began working for a fine dining French restaurant called Fleur de Lys and then slowly moved into a food & beverage managerial role with a couple Wolfgang Puck concepts. When I was 22 I was off to work for a deluxe 5 star resort in Sardinia, which later propelled my career to working abroad. I spent the next 6 years scaling my position from restaurant manager, to operations manager, to director of food and beverage, having the privilege of working in luxury hotels such as the opening team of the St Regis Bangkok, Grand Hyatt Singapore, Hilton Tokyo, and Hotel Del Coronado San Diego.
The thing I’m most proud of is that my previous experiences are actually not in the kitchen, but in the front of the house. Even though I’ve been exposed to cooking my whole life, it wasn’t until I opened Il Massimo at 31 years old that I really became hands on. 5 years later and we are now voted one of the best restaurants in the city. It’s a good example that all you need is the imagination, the vision, the palate, and a good team that can assist in making your vision become a reality. I have no partners or assistants, so I had to train all of the front of the house and back of the house team myself, most of whom had little to no experience with Italian food. We started with a few pasta recipes from my father’s old restaurants and over the course of 4-5 years, continuously evolved Il Massimo into what it is today using a lot of passion, experimentation, and trial and error.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Coming from a hotel background I had to shift my mentality to an entrepreneurial one. In hotels you have many departments assisting you, such as Human Resources for hiring staff, Engineering for fixing plumbing and electric issues, Stewarding to provide equipment, and Marketing department to help with promotion. When you own your own restaurant, you are the Human Resources, the Engineering, the Stewarding, and Marketing departments all rolled into one. You learn very quickly on your own how to solve many issues you lonely would have other peers helping you with
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
I was always used to doing large and extravagant grand openings. My thought with Il Massimo was that since I didn’t know anyone in the city when I was about to first open, I needed to organize a big opening party inviting as many important people I can with cocktails and hora d’oeuvres pass around.
Being the great consultant he was, my father quickly convinced me that the best we were just going to open the doors on a random day and organically grow from there. I believe this method has worked out in dividends.
The idea is that when you do a grand opening of such high caliber, your guests will always have a high expectation. To meet, let alone exceed, those expectations is extremely difficult with no prior independent restaurant experience. There’s also the age old Murphy’s law of whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and you only have one chance to make a good first impression.
Therefore, we opened when we felt ready. We did little to no people the first month or two and then word of mouth slowly started to spread and we have now been doing a 50% increase in covers yearly. This also allowed us to polish many rough edges early on to provide our guests the experience that we are proud to offer today
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ilmassimoensenada.com
- Instagram: @ilmassimoensenada
- Facebook: @ilmassimoensenada